The answer lies in the growing waste crisis of the mid to late twentieth century; as the environmental movement gained momentum, people were simultaneously becoming aware of the limits of landfills. A main line of compactor marketing appealed to this sense of pending or imminent catastrophe; one promotion read:

Indeed, another motivation for compactor development was the sense that a financial windfall awaited anyone who might solve it. In the United States of the twentieth century, solid waste management was one of the most expensive public works projects. Fiscally, municipal trash management works on economies of density, not scale; doubling the weight collected per mile could cut costs in half. Given that by 1975 the handling of solid waste was estimated to cost over $5 billion per year, increasing the density of waste through compactors or other means was attractive, to say the least.